Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (13 page)

Water was everywhere in abundance, but the dampness bred an amazing proliferation of parasites, from larvae that bore their way into the skin of those who wade in streams, causing blindness years later, to fly-borne parasites that attack cattle, making it impossible to raise a herd. Malaria and common diarrhea alone kill millions of African children each year. And though hard to measure, the toll of disease on the survivors is easy to grasp: generalized lethargy and shortened lifespans. More recently, AIDS had descended on the continent like a coup de grâce delivered against those who had survived against already long odds. In countries like Congo-Brazzaville, perhaps a third of the population had already become infected.

We pulled into Kibossi toward the end of lunch hour to find a Sunday afternoon scene pretty much typical of any village between Senegal and Zimbabwe. As scrawny chickens pecked for specks of grain by their feet, the village men, their clouded eyes bloodshot with a hint of yellow mixed in with the red, sat on benches alongside low-slung concrete buildings talking loudly and drinking beer from brown bottles as long as their forearms. The women were still at work, bending low to sweep their courtyards with their long African brooms of splayed straw bunched and tied loosely at one end; feeding naked, runny-nosed babies; or deep-frying batter-dipped delicacies for their young daughters to sell by the roadside as the afternoon stretched into evening.

Foreigners don’t pull into little villages like this very often, and as we got out of the Land Cruiser everyone stopped what they were doing to watch us. André approached the most sober of the men nearby and asked him in the local language if Tansi was to be found anywhere nearby.

The hubbub increased, drawing people out of their homes and attracting lots of bystanders. Through experience, I already had the distinct feeling that we were about to be led on a goose chase. Some people claimed to have heard of the recent arrival of the man we were looking for. They said he wasn’t staying in this village, but rather across the nearby river, and a good walk upstream.

Having come all this way at such expense, we couldn’t turn back without having a look, so we haggled over the boat ride we would need to take, recruited a guide and were soon on our way. Robert and I sat, along with our guide, in a pirogue, a dugout made from the long but shallow trunk of a local hardwood tree, along with two young men who steered us across the river, sometimes paddling with a crude oar and sometimes standing and pushing against the bottom with a long wooden pole. With the boat wobbling jerkily, bringing the warm and muddy water to the very lip of the low-slung hull, I was convinced that we would end up swimming for our lives. And yet somehow, we made it across.

To my chagrin, it took only a few minutes on the far bank to confirm that Tansi was not living in, nor had he ever lived in, this village. He had never even been heard of there. Going with the flow, however, even when it is hard to discern much of any direction, is a necessity in Africa. It is not my style, but I had learned to enjoy it, making a virtue of momentarily surrendering control. I had seen too many foreign correspondents tearing their hair out in frustration over Africa’s chaos or cursing the venality or supposed incompetence they claimed to see everywhere, even as they offered to bribe their way through situations unbidden.

An improvised trip, and the experiences like these it provided, sometimes overshadowed the destination itself, becoming a source of understanding, or at least of feeling for a continent so many others were content to damn. So, having had an opportunity to admire the boatmen’s uncanny balance—and little more—we returned to Kibossi, paid our various helpers and companions, and set off for the return trip to Brazzaville.

The advantage of a good travel companion goes beyond plain company; his real value is in the kind of moral encouragement he provides in situations like these. Robert had maintained his usual cheer in Timbuktu, even as I succumbed to dysentery. We had kept each other going on huge overland trips—navigating by the moonlight in the near-desert wastelands between Ouagadougou and Niamey, rushing to cover the overthrow of one of the region’s rare elected governments, or surviving the horrible road between Burkina Faso and Ghana that we had taken on with a battered taxi with broken seats.

As weary as I was this time, Robert, who sat in the bumpy back seat of the car with the loud music and with André’s still-complaining girlfriend in her showy but faintly ridiculous faux-Chanel blouse, had to be even more exhausted. But just as I was about to give up the search for Tansi, he asked what we should try next. So once back in Brazzaville we did what we should probably have done from the very start: We went to Tansi’s city home in search of information.

The afternoon had turned so hot it even seemed to slow the bulbous green equatorial flies that swarm around restaurants and refuse heaps in Brazzaville. We found the house with little difficulty. It was an unassuming place in the Bakongo quarter, a little larger than most, perhaps, but nothing special in this dusty grid of streets. A couple of teenagers sat on the veranda with machine guns, posting guard, which we took as a good sign. But once under the awnings, a glimpse at the near-total darkness inside made me think Tansi was not there.

After a moment’s wait, Tansi’s son, Regis, appeared, sporting a look much like our driver’s, complete with gold neck chain. The style, popular all over Africa, was innocuous enough, but as an African-American, and thereby, by definition, as a descendant of slaves, I always found it ironic. Africa had been taken over and Balkanized by Europeans eager to find gold. And from there, one commodity led seamlessly to another, resulting in the trade in human beings, with black people in chains shipped off to their death or bondage by the millions from places all up and down this coast.

Regis said he knew where his dad was and seemed eager to see him, so I invited him to come along as we set off once more in the Land Cruiser. The new destination was a place called Foufoundou, a tiny village not found on Michelin’s maps of the region, which I always carried. Regis seemed confident, though, so we forged on, traveling well past the turnoff to Kibossi.

As the afternoon wore on, though, despair gradually displaced my earlier serenity. We were driving on sandy secondary roads now, and the tracks in the soft earth brought here by the Congo basin’s rivers were so deep that the car could often steer itself for minutes at a stretch. The massive growth of grasses and bamboo had overwhelmed what had been roadway. The heavy stalks of bushes and vines that constantly scratched and banged away at the car had turned our pathway into a tunnel of thick greenery. I distracted myself from my growing fears of our breaking down and of the approaching darkness by imagining this terrain in prehistoric times. I was back to my visions of
Jurassic Park,
and found myself imagining encounters with some hitherto uncatalogued beast.

There was that music, too—the record by Madilu, playing over and over. I didn’t know any Lingala, the language of most Congolese pop, outside of the most common expressions of romantic affection that are repeated in almost every song, but somehow I was beginning to intuit the meaning of his fulsome valentines. When the tail-wagging intensity of the music slowed, it was just possible to imagine that the repeated references to enigmas and paradoxes evoked by the singer were about the dilapidated state of this “rich” country and its nonexistent roads, rather than some melancholic expression of the singer’s romantic obsessions.

According to the guidebooks, this former French colony boasted a total of 770 miles of paved roads, but from the evidence of our travels, even that modest figure seemed impossible to believe. André was characteristically laconic in explaining the shortfall. “Why don’t we have roads in this country after so many years of oil exports? Because the money came in, and the politicians spent it. The worst part is that we told them: Take your time, eat well. The Congolese people have contented themselves dancing while their leaders ate sumptuous meals.”

Whether or not we would ever find Tansi, André’s words had just brought us closer to him, I thought. He knew almost nothing of the writer, but taking different routes, the two shared conclusions.

We eventually came to a clearing, an old railway town on an abandoned line. Children were playing soccer half naked in the muddy streets. The local language had changed since Kibossi, as it does every few miles in many parts of this continent, but with a bit of struggle André was able to understand enough to know that we were drawing close to our destination. Just when I thought the road could not get worse, it did. To exit this forgotten settlement, we had to move the rotting trunk of a tree from the path, and as the overgrowth became ever heavier, the car groaned and brayed through the sand and bush, threatening to stall or seize up every few minutes.

When we finally reached another clearing, this one a patch no bigger than a two-car garage, André spotted a toothless old woman loading up a sack of kindling to carry home to prepare her evening meal. He called out to her and then approached. With only a couple of hours left to go before the sun’s demise, I was not encouraged to see her pointing off into the distance.

When he returned, he said we would have to leave the car there and walk. “She said it isn’t too far,” André told us. “We just have to cross a river and climb the next foothill over there.”

Robert and I got out, detecting a recurrent theme, and together with Regis, the four of us began our hike. I was in city clothes, clearly made for concrete sidewalks and tiled floors, but with a minimum of slipping and sliding, down I went, until we reached the river, which was really more like a creek. There we had to clamber across a fallen tree, all mossy and slick, to reach the other side. Then, as we huffed and puffed up the hill, Regis began to speak up a bit for the first time. I asked him why his father would come to a place like this. Was it his village? Regis said no, and tried his best to explain. “He had no peace in Brazzaville,” he said. “He must have come here to find peace.”

At the crest of the hill I could indeed make out a small village. A few puffs of smoke were wafting up from a cluster of huts, indicating that it was inhabited, and my spirits followed them skyward.

All the huts were constructed with bamboo and mud walls and thatched roofs, and were arranged in a semicircle around a broad, open space. As I approached, I noticed a skinny unshaven man of indeterminate age. He was barefoot, and rocked backward on a wooden chair. He was holding a pipe and turned as he heard our footsteps. “Mysteries still exist,” the man exclaimed. And as he turned toward us in greeting, his mouth opening into a huge toothy grin, I recognized him as Sony Labou Tansi. “They told me you would come, and now you are here.”

I had no chance to ask Tansi what he meant. His hair was wildly overgrown and bore a distinctive patch of white on the crown of his head, and as I drew close to him, he began to speak agitatedly. He began explaining how he had come to this place, and his words tumbled forth, lucid enough, but still somewhat scattershot. “The treatments they were giving me in Paris were not having any effect,” he said, scratching himself constantly against the wooden chair’s backrest. “When I returned to Brazzaville I met a prophet who told me to come here.”

As he spoke, growing more and more excited, I could hear soft murmurs coming from a bamboo and straw cabana at the edge of the carefully swept clearing. Tansi said it was his wife, Pierrette. She was very weak, he said, too weak even for the African miracles that seemed to have revived him.

“There is sacred writing in this place. You will soon see for yourself. The Mother has been reading the Scriptures, and the Scriptures said that foreigners were on their way.” In a few minutes, I would understand to whom and to what he was referring.

Tansi had shown a flash of tenderness, an affectionate smile, toward his son, who was trying to be brave but looked devastated. Tansi now had an audience and was holding forth, all the more vigorously since it had all been prophesied. Regis wandered off to find his mother, who, as we later saw for ourselves as we fed her peeled grapes while she lay on a cheap mat, was very near death.

“I’ve been writing a lot. Some of my best work,” Tansi said. “But the French people don’t want to publish it. They said I am too hard on France, but in their egotism, they’ve missed the point. Asia has come into its own. Latin America has come into its own. Africa alone has failed, and I will not mince my words about the reasons why: We are still sick from a sort of contamination that began under colonization.

“Our leaders follow the examples they were taught by the Europeans, stealing money and never doing anything for the people. I’m calling my newest work ‘La Cosa Nostra,’ because it is about Africa’s dictators and their protectors in Europe, but I am asking the world to reconsider Africa, too. I am asking for a Marshall Plan to rescue us. The cultural richness here is incredible, and it is being destroyed. It cannot be allowed to go to waste.”

Briefly, Tansi discussed his latest passion, Solzhenitsyn, and said he had read
Cancer Ward
over and over in his Paris hospital room. “We are all doomed, fated to die,” he said, emitting an enthusiastic deep-voiced cackle that triggered a rattling cough. “But in the meantime there is nothing to stop us from living.”

At this instant, we began to hear the sound of chanting in the distance. Then, emerging suddenly from the bush, came a procession of villagers led by a robust woman draped in white. At the sight of us, they began cheering ecstatically.

Tansi identified the woman who led this troupe as Emilie Kiminou, the “Mother who receives the messages,” and suddenly the swept earth of the clearing had become a stage. Tansi produced a sheaf of loose papers filled with bold, loopy scribblings that looked like the work of a deranged child. Instructing me to watch carefully, he handed them to Mother Emilie, who, half singing, half chanting, proceeded to “read” these messages, speaking in tongues at a breakneck speed.